Tag Archives: opinion polling

Following on from my critique of polls and polling companies, I have produced this flow chart that explains how opinion polling works. Polls don’t exist to measure public opinion, they exist to shape it. The media and the polling companies enjoy a symbiotic relationship in which each sustains the other. One supplies a narrative and the other responds by producing a poll to support that narrative. The media company then produces a story that reinforces the initial narrative, which uses the poll as ‘evidence’. You may need to click on the image to view it properly.

Even when polls are patently nonsensical or illogical, their ‘findings’ are lauded by commentators and their followers, who cite them as evidence to support one narrative or another. One such poll is the recent ComRes poll , which claimed that “most people” think the Tories would do a better job at running the National Health Service this winter than Labour. The same poll also claimed that “most people” thought the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, was doing a “poor job”. Make of that what you will. In any case, the media’s commentators seized on it and cherry-picked its ‘findings’. The negative narratives that had already been produced to put the Labour Party in a bad light were thus reinforced by this shoddy poll.